Ultralearning

x

Prefer action which is biased toward active skill generation rather than knowledge generation through passive learning.

27

You want to learn things intensively because doing hard things well and overcoming your limiting beliefs is what leads to true satisfaction. It also helps with your job.

28-29

medium skilled jobs are being shipped overseas and, as a result, there's increasing skill polarization. Getting a degree and working hard is not the answer. One must continually learn in order to maintain a secure advantage since higher-skilled jobs are harder to ship overseas (same with lower skilled jobs).

30-31

Technology presents the greatest learning opportunity and the greatest distraction. Mastering self-control can enable you to learn diffciult topics easily. However, you didn't need new tech to do so.

32

You can accellerate your normal career progression.

33

Become indispensable.

46

What will differentiate your learning is obsessive work ethic and correct definition of goals. Setting a limit defines how far but it is better to push yourself to see how far you can go instead.

47

the usage of principles is what undergirds all successful Ultralearning projects since Ultralearning is not cookie cutter.

49

The Ultralearner is taking responsibility for your own learning.

50

The principles are flexible guides, not rigid rules

53

Meta learning is learning how to learn a particular subject.

"How a subject works, skills and information that must be mastered, and what methods are available to do so."

55

Meta learning is the map that shows you how to study a subject. It shows you how information in a topic is structured. It exists in all subjects.

57

Meta learning, because of its ability to determine how and what to learn about a subject, reduces or eliminates the risk of misdirected self-directed learning. Ultralearning can be mistaken for intelligence and skill.

58

Meta learning framing is composed of three questions.

59

Why: one way to vet a prospect is to ask someone who has already done it.

61/62

What: is looking at how the knowledge in the domain is structured. Break it down into concepts, things that need to be understood more than memorized, facts, things that must be memorized, procedures, things that must be practiced.

63

Once you know the concepts, facts, and procedures, you can complete a course-grained analysis of the potential learning bottlenecks by underlining the toughest topics. Doing so will enable you to determine efficient study techniques and tools.

How

64/65

Benchmarking

For topics taught in schools look for a common syllabus online to use as a starting point. For topics not taught at a school, search or use the expert interview method.

Emphasize / Exclude (65)

Consider modifying the default curriculum by including areas that align with your goals and bypassing areas that don't. If you don't understand enough about the topic to even make the determination, learn more using the default curriculum before doing so. Topics with obvious success criteria are easier to analyse as to what is important or not.

Planning (66)

Invest about 10% of your time planning (depending on the project) though continue to plan and reasses as you continue to plan and reassess as you continue though the project. You must weigh the cost benefit or marginal benefits of meta learning vs learning. Find the sweetspot between meta learning and research and analysis paralysis.

Flow

Focus, Starting (73)

Procrastination stops deep work before it even starts. Train yourself to recognize when and why you are procrastinating. The why is comprised of not wanting to do X or wanting to do Y instead.

Tools (75)

Use tools to overcome distractions. When you recognize an impulse to avoid or do X, implement the 5 minute rule. Force yourself to work on the task for 5 minutes. The impulses don't usually last that long. Get past the unpleasentness. Oftentimes you'll get into the flow. However, sometimes you might find yourself abusing the 5-minute rule. When that happens, you might need to use other techniques, pomodoro, or rule extensions, force yourself to memorize the last card. That increases discipline and persistence. The latter practice helps with when the moment of frustration or avoidance happens often the start.

Sustaining Focus (77)

The goal focus state is one in which you are furthering your knowledge. This can be a flow state but it often will be a state of pushing your limits and this intense work which focus is not. The key difference is that you often must maintain self-conciousness (or awareness) in the focus state which is not inline with flow.

For optimal retention it is often best if you work on multiple topics during a chunk of a few hours. 50 minute to 1 hour chunks are best for a topic.

Distraction Sources (80)

Take steps to ensure a quite, distraction-free environment and don't multitask (watching TV or listening to music). Multitasking is a vice that undermines ultralearning and deep work alike.

Some tasks encourage focus more than others - videos e.g. - so the means for learning should be taken into consideration. However, that shouldn't override other considerations or goals. Use techniques, such as taking notes that explain a topic in your own words, to increase focus and decrease mental wandering.

You must train your mind to be optimally effective at learning. If emotions or feelings come bubbling up, strive to strengthen your commitment to focus not through ignoring (suppressing) them but through acknowleding, building awareness, and releasing it. Diminish the emotion. Act as your own counselor and replay what you're telling yourself, only diminished.

However, for truly large problems, you must deal with them first. First taken care of your own house. This includes physical well-being and mental clarity.

In order to create the right kind of focus, you need to strike the balance between problem complexity and arousal. The ideal state of arousal depends on your current state of alertness and energy. Doing things to boost those when they're already high can be counter-productive. Single tasks tend to benefit from higher states of arousal whereas more complex tasks seem to benefit from a more relaxed state so that the senses are not as focused.

Taking a break can help with a challenging problem but only if you're put in enough time to garner the requisite knowledge to allow your subconcious to work on it.

When striving to improve focus, start small and continually work on doing better through recognizing where you are every step of the way.

Directness (90)

Generally, it is best to understand the practical application or problem domain in a field, things that eployers need or that you actually want to do (such as holding a conversatin in a language), before you attempt to master theory or idealized problems. Learn with a connection to the context. This is known as "transfer appropriate processing" in psychological literature.

Doing the thing that you want to get good at is when most of the learning takes place.

Our schooling institutions are demonstratably not set up for transfer of knowledge. Students can rarely solve problems that deviate even slightly from problem sets that deviate even slightly from problem sets they saw in school. Increased direct knowledge and application in a domain greatly aids transfer. Analogies are examples of transfer.

Learning things first from the context in which they'll be used allows you to build outward from a real context. Doing so aids in transfer from other real world domains and avoids the treacherous task of transfer from disparate, and even contrived, situations and contributions. Oftentimes the knowledge is tied to the context in which it was initially learned. If the context is contrived then the knowledge won't be as transferable nor as meaningful.

Wherever possible, learn by doing since that is the most direct approach.

When There isn't as abvious practical application, you may need to create one. Such as creating a course to teach others or using machine learning in a game. The deeper your knowledge in a domain, the more flexible the transfer (knowing more than one language).

Projects

One way to learn directly is to complete a project. With a project, you'll at least be able to produce that thing - intellectual topics can also be project based such as writing a paper, to accomplish an end goal (such as conversing intelligently about a topic).

Immersion

Another technique is immersion. It encourages lots of practice and a variety of experience and situations: one example is learning a language.

The cognitive feature and environemnt (or flight rim method) is ideal for skills that cannot be easily practiced directly. However, you must forcefully recreate the cognitive decision making, though not necessarily physical, environment. They should simulate the direct approach.

Overkill

Lastly the overkill method can prepare you for difficult challenges. Do so by setting the bar higher than your actual goals. This may create fear but it should abate quickly.

Ask yourself when and how the knowledge will manifest itself and how it t ies into the context.

Drill

You can increase the rate of your learning through identifying the bottlenecks, critical practiciing, that must be learned well and eliminating then through repetative drill.

Direct then Drill

Is comprised of three different parts. First, is doing the thing you want to learn so that you can learn what to decompose into drills. This may need to be coupled with research. An example, from ping pong is first playing the game so that you can learn what is important (the basic strokes). Next, analyze what you learned and break it down into rate limiting subskills that can be drilled.

Lastly, go back to direct practice and integrate transfer what you learned from drilling. This allows you to adjust and or can drill. Early on, this cycle should be quick whereas once mastery is approached, your time will be spent almost exclusively on drilling.

Problems with Drilling (113)

1. figuring about whatand when to drill
2. designing and applying the drill so you improve
3. drilling is hard

Strategies for finding drills

1. Time slicing. Find a way to decompose a skill into moments that have heightened difficulty and importance
2. Cognitive complexity. Drill only a single part even if it doesn't make sense in the broader context. E.g., practicing tones in a language.
3. Copy parts you don't want to drill. E.g. editing something you've already written.
4. Spend more time on what you want to drill if it can't be separated easily.
5. Start hard and then step back and learn the things that are meaningful

Why and context

Know the WHY and context behind the drill. Well designerd drills bring about creativity and recognition.

Something mentally strenuous provides a greater benefit than something easy.

Retrieval

Between reviewing source material, mind-mapping, and testing yourself/retrieval, retrieval wins out every time when it comes to long term retention.

Don't want to practice testing/retrieval. Do it early and before you feel you're ready.

Difficulty helps with retrieval as long as the retrieval is succesfull. Test after enough passage of time to make retrieval challenging but not impossible. Retrieval enhances future learning.